


Death under the Sun

by Energybeing



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-02 03:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 11,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4044742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Energybeing/pseuds/Energybeing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A gift isn't always something that you give. Sometimes it's something that you receive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Buffy or Greek mythology, both of which feature heavily here. 
> 
> The story starts during the events of 'The Body'.

So, if a tear when thou art dying,  
Should haply fall from me,  
It is but that my soul is sighing,  
To go and rest with thee.  
-Emily Brontë 

~*~

In Sunnydale, having a weird day was normal. Dawn would’ve been alarmed if a day had gone by without some kind of demon attack or a threat by an angry Hell Goddess. It would’ve meant that something even worse was undoubtedly on the way.

Today was no exception to the rule. However, in Sunnydale, things were generally the physical kind of weird. Vampires invading the school was normal practice, but nothing like that had happened. All that happened was that Dawn felt strange. Not the existential kind of strange that she’d been struggling with ever since she had first discovered that she was the Key. This was something entirely different, something that Dawn had never felt before.

It was difficult to describe precisely what it felt like. It was a sensation of… distance. Not the kind of distance that you might feel upon standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, though. It was entirely different from the feeling of all that space stretching out in front of and beneath you.

To say that it felt as though a part of Dawn was distant from the rest of herself wouldn’t be accurate, either. The closest analogy Dawn could come up with was the sensation you have when very something important to you breaks or is lost. A sort of constricted feeling around your chest, a tightness in your lungs.

That wasn’t all of it, though. Dawn remembered the day when her hamster Gerald had died. She’d been six, and living in LA at the time. Hank had told her that Gerald had gone to a better place. Dawn had accepted that without question. Now, it felt as though the thing that had been broken, whatever it was, had gone somewhere else. Not better, necessarily. Just elsewhere.

It didn’t make any sense to Dawn. Not only was the feeling itself confusing and difficult to deal with, she also couldn’t imagine why she was feeling that way. She hadn’t broken anything important to her. She hadn’t lost anything.

So, throughout the school day, Dawn tried to put it out of her mind, hoping it would go away. Or at the very least turn into something that she could make sense of.

It didn’t go away, or change. But something happened that allowed Dawn to make sense of it.

Buffy showed up to take her out of class. Dawn had gotten used to Buffy looking kind of stretched thin, as she tried to deal with Glory and Dawn and Mom and school. Now, on top of that, she looked fragile. Like a sharp blow would shatter her into a thousand pieces.

Honestly, that scared the hell out of Dawn, even more than Buffy’s unprecedented presence at school. Buffy had always, always been strong. Even before Dawn had known that she was the Slayer, there had always been that air of quiet competence to her, even when she was freaking out about whatever latest Big Bad was in town, or what clothes she should wear for her date with Riley.

So Dawn braced herself for whatever news it was that Buffy had thought was so urgent that she had had to interrupt Dawn’s class to tell her.

“What’s going on?” Dawn said, once Buffy had pulled her out in the corridor.

“I’ve, uh, got some bad news.” Buffy hedged.

Dawn didn’t know whether to be flippant or serious. Normally, she’d plump for flippant, (that was the Scooby way, after all) but Buffy looked like she’d been crying. If Buffy was crying, then it meant something Earth-shatteringly bad had happened.

So. Serious it was, then. “What happened? Is it Glory? Has she… she hasn’t found out, has she?”

Buffy didn’t seem to be able to meet Dawn’s eyes. “No. No, it’s not that. It’s… something’s happened to Mom. Something went wrong with her tumour.”

Earthquake. Or just Dawn’s world shifting beneath her feet. She couldn’t tell which it was. She didn’t care. “She’s… she’s okay though, right?” Dawn said, desperately seeking an answer she knew she wouldn’t receive.

Dawn could see Buffy’s lips shaping the words that she knew she didn’t want to hear. Words that couldn’t be true. “No. She… she died this morning.”

Everything was still. Buffy finally looked at Dawn. She wasn’t lying, she could tell, but this was just something so enormous that she couldn’t possibly swallow it. Buffy had to be wrong somehow, didn’t she?

Only she wasn’t. The strange feeling that Dawn had been feeling all day suddenly made sense. Joyce had died. She had gone, crossed some vast distance which Dawn couldn’t even begin to contemplate.

But, as she thought about it, in that eternal moment that stretched on far too long, Dawn realised that she wasn’t. Oh, Joyce wasn’t here, not anymore, but she wasn’t gone. She was just elsewhere. That was what Dawn had been feeling, all day. Her mom had just gone somewhere else.

For one glorious moment, Dawn felt at peace, secure in the knowledge that, somewhere, her mom still existed.

But then reality, or at least the part of it that included her and this plane of existence, came crashing down on her. Joyce might very well be somewhere else entirely, but she wasn’t here. She would never be here again. Dawn would never see her again. It didn’t matter that she was somewhere else. Dawn wasn’t. She was here, and she missed her mother.

Dawn clung to her sister, the only solid thing in a world that was cast adrift without an anchor, and proceeded to cry her eyes out.


	2. Chapter Two

How many lilies dead and gone  
Had made that flower face of hers?  
-Narcissa Harrison

~*~

They went back home. Dawn didn’t want to, she didn’t want to see where it had happened, where Joyce had left to go somewhere else, somewhere she couldn’t follow. But she didn’t want to go to the hospital, either, to wait while the coroner tried to figure out what had gone wrong with her mother’s fragile body that had led to her leaving it.

At least, at home, she didn’t have to deal with the sterile impersonality of doctors and the whitewashed blandness of the morgues halls. Death shouldn’t be like that. Death was a personal matter, to be dealt with by family and friends. These outsiders, these people who had dealt with countless deaths, who had become inured to the grief of others, they had no place in it.

No, home was better.

~*~

Dawn could sense where it had happened, even before she noticed the way Buffy kept darting glances at the sofa. It was like there was something imprinted there, something that bore the mark as the final resting place of Joyce Summers. Wherever they were burying her, that would be just the shell. The real Joyce, she was long gone. Dawn could feel that much.

Dawn didn’t expect to be filled with rage when faced with the flowers that the mysterious Brian had left. “See you soon?” the note said. But he wouldn’t. No one would. No one here, at least. It was a lie, a hopeful plea, a false expectation.

Dawn almost swept out an arm to demolish them, to knock them from their stand and shatter the vase upon the floor. What place did these flowers, so bright and sweet, have in a place like this? But she didn’t. It had been Joyce’s favourite vase. The flowers were the last remnant of her living life, rather than whatever existence she now had in the plane that Dawn could dimly sense.

Instead, Dawn absent-mindedly plucked a flower out of the bouquet, twirling it between her fingers, focusing on the tactile sensation that touching the stem gave her so that she didn’t have to think about why she could feel Joyce in some other realm, why she could sense the imprint (fading, even now) of the place where she had died.

It was a lily, Dawn noticed. How appropriate. Lilies were traditionally the flowers placed on graves. Dawn stood there, staring at the white flower in her hand, smelling its scent, while Buffy went and… well, actually, Dawn wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing. Dawn had kind of zoned out when Buffy had told her. These mundane realities, they didn’t make sense to her. Not now. Not with Joyce’s death somehow permeating the atmosphere of the house, with Dawn somehow sensing her soul in the afterlife, with this symbol of death in her hands. With so much death everywhere, what right did life have to continue on?

Dawn, not even noticing what her hands were doing, began to pull the petals off of the flower, rolling them into little balls before neatly placing them on the table. It wasn’t until she had removed them all and was left clutching nothing more than a stem that she realised what she had been doing.

She felt slightly bad about it. They’d been her mother’s flowers, and she’d just casually killed this particular one without even noticing what she had been doing.

On the other hand, perhaps it was a fitting sacrifice. Killing the symbol of death that had belonged to a dead woman. Dawn could see the symmetry in that.

Buffy came down the stairs. She’d changed her clothes, Dawn realised. She understood that. Buffy wouldn’t want to wear the clothes she had had on when she’d discovered Joyce. Not that it mattered, really. She was still just as dead.

“Can you feel it?” Dawn said suddenly, setting aside the stalk.

“Feel what?” Buffy said with the bland, flat tone that was all she had been able to muster since she’d found Joyce. Dawn guessed that if she showed any emotion, anything at all, she would break like a faulty dam and swamp everyone in a deluge of tears. She probably thought that she had to be strong, like a Slayer should. Like an older sister should.

She didn’t remember that she was a daughter, too.

“Mom.” Dawn clarified. “She’s… somewhere else. Can’t you feel it?”

Buffy looked at her blankly. “I don’t understand.”

Dawn shrugged. She didn’t either. “It’s like the part of her that was here, the part that wasn’t just th-the body, is gone. Gone to some afterlife, or something. Somewhere far away. Somewhere I… somewhere we can’t go.”

Buffy’s gaze went involuntarily to the sofa again. “No.” Buffy said softly, to her own surprise. She hadn’t expected to answer. She repeated herself a little stronger this time. “No. she’s just… gone, Dawn. I can't feel where she’s gone. I just know that she isn’t here.”

Dawn wished she could explain, that she could share what she felt. She knew it would help Buffy, if she knew that Joyce had gone somewhere safe, that she hadn’t just stopped. Stopped everything. But she could barely articulate it to herself, let alone to Buffy. But she tried, anyway. “I can’t describe it, really. She isn’t gone, exactly, I can feel… um, it’s like she isn’t gone, she just isn’t here. She’s somewhere else.”

Buffy just looked at her. She didn’t have the faintest of ideas about what she should say to that.

Dawn glanced at the sofa before adding “She’s happy, though. I can tell that.”

Buffy’s lips twitched, like she was going to say something but didn’t. She wanted to accept what Dawn was saying, that her mom was somewhere else, somewhere good. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t be absolutely sure. That wasn’t something humans, even Slayers, could ever know for sure. She feared that Dawn believed that as a coping mechanism, something to help her deal with the shock and loss.

God, but she could use one of those.

Dawn laid a hand on Buffy’s shoulder. “It’s true, Buffy.” She said with a quiet confidence that was nevertheless underscored by grief. “She might not be here, but that doesn’t mean that she’s gone.”

Buffy thought that it should’ve been her job to do the comforting. She should be the strong one. She blinked back unwanted tears and said with a voice that didn’t shake or crack at all “Let’s go, Dawnie.”


	3. Chapter Three

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,   
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,   
I had not thought death had undone so many.  
-T.S. Eliot

~*~

Dawn felt fine while they drove to the morgue – well, as fine as she could be, given the circumstances.

When she actually saw the morgue itself, though, Dawn had to fight down the urge to vomit. “Stop the car!” she yelled urgently, groping for the door handle.

Buffy instantly pulled over, turning into one of Sunnydale’s innumerable alleyways. “What’s wrong?”

Dawn didn’t answer, because had scrambled out of the car and was busy vomiting up everything she had ever eaten in her entire life, and hoping that her head wouldn’t be crushed to the size of a pea due to the vice that was currently squeezing it.

Buffy got out of the car and walked over to Dawn. Rather awkwardly, she patted Dawn on the back and held her hair back. She didn’t know what to do. She had never had to deal with Dawn being ill, Joyce had always done that. Buffy felt another wave of grief as she realised that she would never do so again. “There there.” Buffy said, in what she hoped was a comforting tone.

Dawn staggered upright, walking further into the alley so that she was further away from the morgue. Buffy made to follow her, but reached into the car to retrieve a bottle of water first. “Are you okay, Dawn?”

Ha. What a question. One that Dawn couldn’t even answer properly, not without seeming as though she had lost her mind. She gratefully took the water, swilling some around her mouth before spitting it out and taking a proper drink to sooth her aching throat.

Then she tried to explain what she had felt that had prompted her feeling like that. “Can’t you feel them, Buffy? There’s just so many empty, cold shells in there. There’s no life, just… just hollowness, so much hollowness. It feels wrong, Buff, they shouldn’t be like that. Don’t you understand? Can't you feel it?”

Buffy didn’t look at Dawn as though she had gone crazy. That was rather more emotion than she felt as though she could manage at the moment. “I don’t get it, Dawnie. Shells? What shells?”

Dawn waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the morgue. “People. The bodies, the empty shells of the people who had been in them. The, the corpses.”

Buffy didn’t understand at all. Dawn had been in cemeteries before. She’d even seen a dead body before, even though Buffy had tried to stop her from seeing the corpse of the owner of The Magic Box before Giles had taken over. She’d seen vampires and demons killed right in front of her. Death had never bothered her before, not like this.

On the other hand, Dawn had never lost her mother before. It was understandable that she would be a little unstable right now.

However, Buffy couldn’t deal with this. She had to go to the morgue, speak to the coroner. There were things she had to deal to with. She didn’t have the time to comfort Dawn. “Look, Dawn, I’ve got to go in there. If you don’t want to come, I-I’ll call Will. She’ll come and pick you up. Okay?”

Dawn nodded, then immediately regretted the action when she felt as though her head might very well come right off. Buffy pulled out her phone and called Willow. “Okay, Dawnie, Willow will be here in a couple of minutes. Just, um, sit tight, okay?” It was daylight, so most of the creepy-crawlies infesting Sunnydale wouldn’t be out and about. Dawn would be alright for a couple of minutes. Especially seeing as how she looked so fragile that she probably wouldn’t move even a few feet from where she was. “Okay then. See you in a bit.”

Dawn didn’t notice when Buffy left. Truthfully, she had only half been listening to what Buffy had been saying.

It didn’t make any sense. She’d been feeling… whatever it was that she was feeling related to Mom’s soul, and that hadn’t bothered her in the slightest. At least not on a physical level. Emotionally it had been all kinds of confusing. But she hadn’t had any inclination to vomit out her stomach. So, what was different about all the shells in the morgue, which even now were gnawing away at her mind, filling her with the kind of crippling nausea usually only to be found in those ridiculous theme park rides that Dawn hated so much?

No, not shells. That was the wrong word. The people who had animated them, given them life, they had gone. Gone to the same afterlife as Joyce had. But they weren’t supposed to be called shells. Bodies was the correct word. Dawn had one, herself. Except her body had someone in it.

The realisation hit her like a lightning bolt. She had felt Joyce’s soul depart her body. She could feel it even now. But those people in the morgue – she hadn't felt them leave. All she had felt was them in the stage they were now, gently decomposing without anyone inside them to hold them together.

She wondered whether she would feel quite so deathly ill if she was face to face with Joyce’s body. Dawn suspected not.

She rolled her shoulders. Great. As if having a roiling, bubbling stomach on the point of ejecting everything in it (again) and a head that felt as though it was being forcibly shrunk wasn’t enough, now her shoulders ached too.

“Hey, Dawnie.” Willow said gently, coming to stand next to her. Tara stood on her other side. “Are you alright?”

Dawn was already sick of that question, and it had only been asked a couple of times today. She figured she would be hearing a lot more of it in the future. “Yeah. I guess. Can we just get away from the morgue? It makes me feel all kinds of sick.”

“Sure. Shall we take you home? Or do you want to come to our place, because, you know…” Willow trailed off awkwardly, not wanting to bring up the fact that Joyce had died there.

Dawn didn’t seem to notice. “Um, home’s fine.”

Tara didn’t say anything as they walked. She’d seen Dawn’s aura.

When Buffy had told them that Dawn was the Key, Tara’s first thought had been that they had done a wonderful job making her aura, because it looked and felt just like a human’s should. She would never have suspected anything.

Now, Dawn’s aura looked the same, but it felt different. It could’ve been the fact that her mother had just died, of course – major changes in someone’s life like that invariably had an effect on their aura – but that didn’t quite seem to cover it. Something was different about Dawn, she was sure of it.

Dawn began to feel better the further they got away from the morgue. After a while, the overwhelming nausea and mind-blowing headache went away completely. The aching shoulders stuck around, unfortunately. Hopefully they’d sort themselves out. “Thanks, guys. I just… I couldn’t deal with that place just at the moment. Thanks for taking me home.”

“No problem.” Willow said.

When Dawn walked through the threshold of her house, she rolled her shoulders again, hoping to shift the ache a little. It didn’t help with that, but it did do something else.

Something shifted in Dawn’s head, like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle slipping into place. The imprint on the sofa, the odd feeling that Dawn felt whenever she was near the place where Joyce had died, faded away.

Not that Dawn noticed that immediately. She was too preoccupied with an overpowering sensation of bliss.

It faded after what could’ve been a century, but was more likely to have been a couple of seconds. Dawn smiled, not caring that she could no longer sense her mother. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she had gone to Heaven.

Willow hadn’t noticed a thing, but Tara stared at Dawn. Just for a second, she could’ve sworn that Dawn had had wings.


	4. Chapter Four

Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.  
-Victor Hugo

~*~ 

Generally, people weren’t aware of the progress of someone’s soul through the underworld. Of course, strictly speaking, Dawn wasn’t actually a person, but the principle was the same. Once she got over the moment of ecstatic bliss she’d felt as Joyce entered Heaven, she began to wonder and worry just what the situation was. After all, for a ball of energy that had technically only been human for a few months, she was as normal as a teenage girl with a Slayer for an older sister and a couple of witches as pseudo-sisters could be.

None of them felt the same things she did, that was for certain. Dawn was fairly certain that Buffy thought she’d gone temporarily insane to cope with Mom’s death, but Dawn doubted it. She felt as sane as she’d ever been – and a hell of a lot saner than she had been when she had discovered that she was the Key. Which meant that something else was happening to her.

Dawn’s immediate reaction was that Glory had to be behind it. She knew that the Hell God was capable of casting incredibly powerful spells. Maybe she had cast one that would only affect the Key, thus allowing her to figure out who the Key was from their reaction.

“I really hate Gods.” Dawn muttered under her breath.

“What was that, Dawnie?” Willow said, looking up. She felt incredibly uncomfortable in this situation. She had tried to engage Dawn in conversation, but she didn’t really know what to say, and Dawn apparently didn’t want to talk. Which just left them sitting in awkward silence.

“I hate Gods.” Dawn said louder. “I mean, they’re all strong with their godly powers and all that, and then they go around crushing mortals and not dying. I mean, it’s just wrong. Why the hell should they not be able to die? I mean, look at Glory. She’s basically Cordelia only crazier and a God. What did she do that was worthy of being immortal? Everything should die, otherwise it just isn’t fair.”

Tara looked at Dawn intently. Dawn seemed rather shocked by her tirade. Tara might have put it down to her blaming Glory for Joyce’s death, in the same way that Xander had wanted to lash out at someone about it. He’d put his hand through a wall. Maybe this was Dawn’s way of doing the same.

Tara might have thought that, if it hadn’t been for the strangeness with Dawn’s aura, and the suggestion of wings that she had seen just for a fraction of a second. She suspected that something else was going on. Something more than the quite understandable grief at the loss of a parent.

“I don’t think Glory did it.” Willow said. “She’d be crowing from the rooftops if she had. I think it was just, I don’t know, her time, I guess.”

“I know that.” Dawn snapped. “It’s blindingly obvious. A violent death… no, it didn’t feel like that. She just slipped away. But Glory… she’s still an affront to the natural way of things. She shouldn’t exist.”

“Dawn.” Willow said, a hint of worry creeping into her voice. “What do you mean it didn’t feel like a violent death?”

Dawn wished she hadn’t spoken. Willow and Tara would just think she was crazy, like Buffy did. She didn’t think she could deal with that right then, not when they were just about the only people who treated her like an adult.

On the other hand, Willow was clever, and a witch. Short of Giles, she was probably her best bet to find out what was going on with her. “I-I felt her die. I didn’t know what it was at the time, it confused me, but I felt it. And then, just now, when he came in, I felt… I don’t know, exactly. It was as though she had gone somewhere better. Somewhere she was happy.”

Willow opened her mouth to say something (she wasn’t sure what) when Tara said “Dawn, there’s a-a branch of magic. Necromancy. Talking to the dead. Ra-raising them, too, sometimes. I, um, I looked into it a bit when my mom died. I didn’t have any talent for it, though, I wasn’t any good. It-it’s possible that you do. And, um, your mom’s, um… it might’ve, sort of revealed your talents, I suppose.”

Necromancy. Even Dawn, who didn’t know much about magic, knew about that particular branch. Everyone thought it was dark magic, just about as dark as it got. She didn’t want to be associated with that. She didn’t want that to be the reason for what was happening to her.

On top of that, the idea of speaking to the dead, of resurrection, just seemed so completely and entirely wrong that Dawn’s mind couldn’t encompass it. It was as though someone had told her that, not only did the Sun rise in the west, but that it had always done so. It was just so, so wrong.

“No.” Dawn said, simply. “It isn’t that.”

She knew that they wouldn’t accept that, though. After all, what Tara was saying was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Any attempt on her part to convey the incredible wrongness of her idea would just seem like the whining of a teenage brat trying to deny that she had any affinity for dark magic.

“Spike.” Dawn said suddenly. “Spike’s dead. If I’m a-a necromancer, then I should be able to, I don’t know, necromance him or something.” Even the word felt wrong in her mouth, like she was trying to swallow a pebble.

Willow turned to Tara. “Well, you’re the expert, honey. Is she right?”

“I’m not an expert. Really, I'm not. I just made a little study of it.” Tara blushed. “But, yeah. I don’t know what she would be able to do, but at the very least she should feel something. Buffy said she had a reaction to being near the morgue, so it could be something like that.”

Dawn hoped it wouldn’t be like that. She still felt fragile. On the other hand, she didn’t really want to sit still and do nothing, wondering what was going on. “It’s still sunny out. Spike’ll probably be in his crypt.”

~*~

As it turns out, he was. Apparently he’d been sleeping, judging by his hastily slung on jeans and shirtless torso. “Ah, hell.” Spike muttered. “I’d have put a shirt on if I’d known it was you, Niblet.”

Under other circumstances, Dawn wouldn’t have minded seeing a shirtless Spike. At the moment, though, her mind was preoccupied with two things. Firstly, an intense relief that she hadn’t vomited all over Spike. She wasn’t even bothered about the other corpses buried all over the cemetery. Which led neatly on to the second thing that concerned her. There was something, some sensation nibbling gently away at the edge of her awareness. There were the shells, the bodies in the ground. They felt right, in an inexplicable way. They were the exact opposite of the bodies in the morgue.

Then there was Spike. He was wrong. Just standing there, in front of her, he was clearly wrong. Not in the same way as the morgue had been. They had been more like what a fish expert might feel at seeing a pike in the sea. It was wrong. It didn’t fit.

Spike did fit, but he fitted wrong. Like a broken jigsaw piece. Bits of him fitted, bits of him didn’t.

Dawn hadn’t the faintest of ideas what she did next. She wasn’t even entirely sure that she had done anything at all. It was more like a piece if the universe had changed, correcting itself.

Spike dropped like a stone. Dawn heard a roaring sound, like the sea.

Instinctively, Tara felt for a pulse, not thinking that, as a vampire, Spike wouldn’t have one. So it wasn’t until a few seconds after she found one that she realised something very, very strange had happened.

Dawn, though, didn’t need to hear Tara’s startled exclamation of “He has a heartbeat!” to know that he did. She could hear it. She could hear the blood rushing through her ears, feel the beat moving up through the soles of her feet. More than that, though, she felt the indescribable rightness of the situation.


	5. Chapter Five

For who is sure he hath a soul, unless  
It see, and judge, and follow worthiness,  
And by deeds praise it? He who doth not this,  
May lodge an inmate soul, but 'tis not his  
-John Donne 

~*~

“What did you…?” Willow began, turning to face Dawn. But she promptly trailed off when she actually saw the young girl. “Uh, Dawn? Did you somehow manage to dye your hair in the last couple of minutes?”

“What?’ Dawn said, surprised. She grasped a lock of her hair, trying to focus on it. It was lighter, she noticed. Not as blonde as Buffy’s was, or even as light as Joyce’s had been, but still several shades lighter than her normal brunette.

Dawn remembered that she had had blonde hair when she had been younger, but it had gradually darkened until it was more or less the same colour as her father’s. She had been incredibly upset about that.

Of course, that had never actually happened. Dawn had always been a brunette. She had never even met her father.

“No, I haven’t.” Dawn said, staring at her hair.

“Well, that’s kind of weird.” Willow said. Tara nudged her in the ribs. “Well, it is.”

“No, you’re right, it is strange.” Dawn said. It was odd enough that she had seemingly resurrected Spike, and that she could sense dead people. Given the fact that her mom had recently died, that made some sense. Or at least as much sense as anything in Sunnydale ever made. But turning blonde? Dawn couldn’t see how that fit in at all.

“So, um…” Tara turned to look at the still unconscious Spike. “W-what exactly did you do to him?”

Dawn didn’t know. She couldn’t even really describe how she had done it, let alone work out what had actually happened. It hadn’t even really felt like she had done something. It had been more like the universe had suddenly noticed that there was something wrong within itself and had fixed the problem.

“I-I don’t know.” Dawn said, staring at Spike as his deathly pale complexion began to redden as blood made its way to his cheeks. “I'm not sure.”

“Well, at least we know that you’re not going crazy.” Willow said. “Not that we thought you were, I mean, but now we know for sure that there’s something going on.”

Dawn wasn’t really paying a great deal of attention. Something was unravelling in her mind, like a long forgotten memory. Dawn tried to grasp the edges of it, but it slipped through her mental fingers. It was as though there was something that she knew, but she didn’t know what it was that she knew. Dawn got the feeling that it was something that she hadn’t known before, but was definitely going to know in the future.

Spike stirred, moving as he began to awaken. This was unusual, as vampires didn’t usually move when they were unconscious or asleep. They didn’t even breathe. Of course, he was definitely breathing now, so maybe it wasn’t so unusual.

“S-should we get him inside?” Tara wondered. “Or will he be fine with the Sun, now?”

At the word “Sun”, the thing that Dawn didn’t yet know finally drifted into her consciousness enough for her to figure out what it was. “No, the Sun won’t bother him now, either way.” Dawn said, matter-of-factly.

“What do you mean, either way?” Willow asked.

The next part of Dawn’s knowledge unfurled. “Either he’ll die, and his soul will pass to through to the Underworld, or his soul will re-enter his body and he will live. Either way, the Sun will not bother him.”

“Uh, Dawn?” Tara asked warily. “How do you know that? You didn’t know that about a minute ago.”

Dawn shrugged, briefly alleviating the ache in her shoulders. “I don’t know how I know. I just know.”

“Okay. I'm kind of creeped out now.” Willow muttered.

Under other circumstances, Dawn might’ve agreed. But, the truth was, as weird and confusing as all of this was, it didn’t freak her out. She didn’t really understand why. Even though strange things were happening to her, she felt considerably calmer than she had when she had first found out that she was the Key.

Dawn supposed, upon further reflection, that it was because it felt natural to her. For all that she didn’t understand the changes that she was undergoing, they felt right, as though they were exactly what should be happening at this point in time.

“So, um, what's going to happen to Spike?” Tara asked. “Is he going t-to be human, or…” she trailed off, unwilling to complete the sentence.

Dawn shrugged again. She didn’t know. Despite the instinctive knowledge that had suddenly unfolded in her mind, she didn’t know what would happen to Spike. “I don’t know.”

Willow looked down at Spike’s body, which now seemed as though it was right on the brink of waking up. “Do you mean you don’t know, or that you don’t know now but you’ll suddenly get some mysterious knowledge in a minute or so?”

Dawn smiled. “I don’t know that either. All I know is that it is up to him.”

“H-how does that work, exactly?”

Dawn spread her hands, trying to articulate the fact that she was just working on instinct here. She had no facts, just feelings. She was spared, however, from making an attempt at wording that when Spike woke up and screamed.

It wasn’t a scream of pain, or fear, or even anger. It was just a wordless scream, tinged slightly by madness. Spike’s eyes flashed yellow before fading back to their normal pale blue. The scream ended, and Spike slumped against the wall of his crypt, eyes unfocused and staring at nothing in particular.

“Well, I guess that answers that question.” Willow said, somewhat shakily.

Dawn didn’t answer. She was sensing something, something similar to what she had felt when Joyce had died. However, whereas Joyce’s soul was whole and complete, and had gone through the process required to enter Heaven precisely as a soul should, what Dawn felt now was just a fragment. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was a fragment of, though. It certainly had nothing to do with Spike’s soul. Dawn could see that quite clearly.

Also, whereas Joyce’s soul had had to wait to be judged, this fragment had not. It had sunk straight into the bowels of the Earth, passing the judges and entering straight into the Fields of Punishment. Dawn knew this instinctively, in way that she couldn’t articulate even to herself.

It was only then that Dawn realised, as the fragment was doomed to eternal damnation, that it had been the demon which had animated Spike and driven him for more than a century.

Willow waved a hand in front of Spike’s face. There was no reaction, not even so much as a blink. “Dawn? Do you have, uh, any of that sudden knowledge that will tell us what’s going on with Spike?”

Dawn focused, returning to the earthly plan of being. “He’s had a demon living in him for more than a hundred years, and now it’s gone. Plus he’s got his soul back. It’s a lot to process.”

“Yeah, I guess it would be.” Willow murmured. “Well, we can’t exactly leave him like this. What do we do, just sit around until he stops being all catatonic?”

Dawn sat down next to Spike, leaning back against the crypt wall. Oddly, the cold, mossy stone helped to lessen the ache in her shoulders. “So, Spike, you’re human now. It’s a bit of a shock, I know, but you’ll get used to it. Of course, you’ll have to get over all the things your body did, but that’s not particularly hard. The demon’s gone, now. You can feel that, right?”

Spike didn’t answer, but his face did undergo a minute change of expression which Dawn decided to take as a yes. “See, the thing is…” Dawn said, as the instinctive knowledge unfurled in her mind. “The thing is, souls are tricky things. They turn up where you least expect them. After all, it wasn’t your demon that offered to kill Drusilla for Buffy, was it?”

Willow and Tara stood listening to the conversation but feeling as though the majority of it was passing way over their heads. It seemed to them that Dawn was talking about something that she hadn’t actually said. As though there was something, some hidden layer of the conversation which only made sense to Dawn and Spike.

Dawn absently made a fist, and then splayed her hand, palm upwards. “I do not hold things quite as fast as people believe.” Dawn said quietly, not meaning to speak and not really understanding what she had said.


	6. Chapter Six

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods.  
-Hesiod

~*~

Glory’s minions weren’t particularly intelligent. Neither were they especially fast, nor notably strong. They were, however, rather good at lurking. They’d had a lot of practice at it, over the years.

Glory had instructed them to use their lurking skills to eavesdrop on the Slayer and the others of her acquaintance, on the off chance that someone might reveal the location of the Key. They had had little luck at the Slayer’s house, because even their hearing did not allow them to hear words spoken behind walls.

Spike’s crypt, however, was different. Very rarely did anyone other than the vampire himself descend into the crypt’s depths, out of earshot. Usually they spoke at the entrance. So it was that they saw the two witches and the Slayer’s sister arrive. And they heard the conversation that followed. They almost ran when they heard Spike’s scream – had it not been for the wrath of their mistress that would surely fall upon them should the fail, they would have done so.

They promptly realised that anyone who could give a vampire life and drive the demon from him was a person of great power. Knowing as they did that the Key was possessed of great power and was temporarily in the form of a human, someone close to the Slayer, they came to the natural conclusion that Dawn was the Key.

Desperate to seek their god’s approval, they decided to seize her, while the witches were occupied with the vampire.

~*~

Willow yelped in surprise as a wave of diminutive creatures crashed into her. She tried to speak a spell, but an oily rag was promptly thrust into her mouth. Such was her shock at this violation that the focus required to use magic eluded her. Tara found herself similarly assaulted. 

The remaining minions grabbed handfuls of Dawn’s clothes, pulling her towards their god’s domain.

Then they died. They didn’t die of a heart attack, or an aneurysm, or from any of the other myriad things that could affect their species. There wasn’t a magic spell. They just stopped. Everything about them died, even down to the bacteria that thrived inside them.

Dawn stood in the centre of a ring of dead minions. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she had done it. She had killed them. She hadn’t even had to think about it. It had been a reflex, as easy as breathing.

She could feel them, all of them, moving through the underworld. She had sent them there. Unlike Spike’s demon, they weren’t headed straight for the Fields of Punishment. They were to be judged, like any other soul. She didn’t know what the judgement would be. That wasn’t her realm. She was just the guide.

A word drifted up from the depths of her subconscious, the same place that the knowledge of what was happening to Spike had come from. Psychopomp. She was the ferryman, the one who escorted the dead to the underworld. She was the one who cut souls loose from their bodies.

Dawn should have been shocked by this revelation, she knew. Up until a while ago, she had thought that she was human. Even when she had found out that she was actually the Key, she had still thought that she was more human than anything else.

But she wasn’t. Dawn wasn’t shocked, or afraid, or even upset. It wasn’t because she knew, somehow, that it was some inalienable part of her being. It just felt right. She imagined that it must have been like this for Willow, when she realised that she was attracted to Tara. It wasn’t at all something that she had expected, but now that it had happened she couldn’t deny the fact that everything felt exactly as it should.

Willow and Tara stood up slowly, not quite sure what was going on. Spike, for his part, didn’t seem to have noticed that anything had happened at all.

Tara took in the scene and turned to Willow. “D-did you do this?”

Willow, however, was looking at Dawn. This wasn’t magic. She knew that. She was a powerful enough witch to sense magic when it was nearby like this. There hadn’t been a trace of it, here. It was something else, something she had never encountered before. “What did you do?”

The words slipped from Dawn’s mouth without passing through her mind. “I will not be trapped again. I will not be caged.”

Willow didn’t know what to make of that. She didn’t know what to make of the fact that Dawn’s hair was no longer even a light brown. It wasn’t blonde, either, or white. It wasn’t any colour, really. The closest she could come to describing it was pale. She didn’t know what to make of the fact that Dawn’s eyes, which had previously been a light blue, now weren’t. They weren’t exactly colourless, either. They were just so pale that her irises merged almost seamlessly with the whites of her eyes. It made seeing her pupils, like dark pinpricks or tunnels, all the more shocking.

“What are you?” Willow asked. “What have you done with Dawn?”

Dawn? She remembered Dawn. She remembered all those years that had never actually happened, and those few months in which Dawn had existed. It was hard to believe, now, that she could ever have thought that she was just a human.

But other memories were unfolding now. Things that had nothing to do with the little human child that she had once thought she was.

She wasn’t Dawn now. Dawn had been the shell, the barrier restraining what lay within. The shell which had cracked, unable to cope with the death of a parent who had never given birth to her. She had begun emerging then.

She looked up at the Sun. It shone brightly, warming the planet. She remembered the Sun. She remembered when it hadn’t been there. She knew she would still be here when it wasn’t.

She hadn’t been out during the day for a long, long time. She had moved under the cover of darkness for millennia, for untold aeons. Ever since she’d been trapped.

She frowned as that particular memory unfolded. She had been tricked, trapped to stop the human king from dying. Sisyphus, had been his name. Death had stopped then. People hadn’t died – it had been impossible. While she had been trapped, souls had remained bound to their bodies. Everyone who should have been killed in battle had carried on, fighting without end.

Ares, the god of war, hadn’t been pleased by that. Death should be final. To battle without cessation deprived the soldiers of glory. He had freed her, allowed her to reap their souls and guide them to the underworld. Death had returned to the world.

Most of her, at least. Part of her had remained in the underworld, chained to a rock by Sisyphus. After that, death hadn’t been perfect. Some things had slipped through her grasp. Vampires, for example. Corpses driven by demons. Such a thing was an abomination, something wrong with the universe. She had fixed Spike. She would fix others.

Other things were affronts to the natural order of things as well. Like the Old Ones. Consigned to the Deeper Well, they were always on the brink of returning to life, needing only the right set of circumstances.

Eventually, humans had dredged her up, freed her from her chains only to substitute them for another kind of prison. They had thought that she was the key to endless life. They were wrong. That wasn’t her domain.

Then Glory had come for them, many, many years later, when they no longer fully understood what she was, thinking that she was the Key to breaking down dimensions, a source of energy. They weren’t entirely wrong. Death was death everywhere, even in other dimensions.

Now, she knew herself, for the first time since Sisyphus had trapped her. She was fully aware of what she was, and there were no chains, no boundaries. She was free, and she was whole.

Death walked under the Sun.


	7. Chapter Seven

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.   
-Bhagavad Gita

~*~

She became aware that Willow had asked her a question. It wasn’t that it was difficult to understand Willow, that was simple enough, but it was difficult to give enough attention to her for the question to penetrate her awareness.

Looking at Willow, the predominant part of her saw the redhead as nothing more than a collection of atoms which would, at some point, dissipate after the soul that animated her descended into the underworld. She would live for a tiny sliver of time, and it would take only a minimal effort for her to hasten that time.

On top of that, it was difficult to focus on the words of the human that stood directly in front of her. This was because, in a manner of speaking, she wasn’t there. She was everywhere. She stood by every human, every demon, everything with a soul. She stood next to them every moment of their lives, and she was there when it ended. Concentrating on the words of just one of those people was difficult.

“Who am I?” she repeated, in a voice that was unused to speech. “I am Thanatos. I am Death.”

“Um, isn’t Thanatos a guy?” Tara murmured.

“A male?” Thanatos said thoughtfully. “Death has no gender. It comes equally to all things, in their time.” Her face twisted, becoming a rictus of hate. Tara and Willow flinched. “Even, eventually, to the gods.”

“What happened to Dawn?” Willow asked, a little nervously.

“She was but a fragment, a piece of the whole. Now, I am one.” Thanatos said, face returning in an instant to the serene expression which she had had since she had killed Glory’s minions.

“Bu-but is she-“ Tara began, before she was cut off.

Thanatos had spread her wings. Tara had only caught a glimpse of them, and only as an extension of Dawn’s aura. But now they were here in reality.

They were colourless and clear, like glass, but the way the light shone through them made them throw out odd slivers of light that didn’t quite seem to fit into the ordinary spectrum. On top of that, although the wings appeared to be of the size they would need to be in order to lift a human aloft, they gave the impression of being far, far bigger than that. They looked as though they filled more space than they actually did.

“It is good to be whole again.” Thanatos said. “And now I must go.”

“Wait!” Willow called, but she was too late. She had already vanished.

~*~

Thanatos didn’t fly away, or teleport, or open a portal. Death was everywhere. She was aware of everything, the fall of every sparrow. It was a simple matter to move the bulk of her awareness from place to another.

If Glory was surprised to see someone appear in her apartment, she didn’t show it. “Hello. You’re the Slayer’s kid sister, right? What happened, did you fall in a vat of magic bleach or something?” she said, smiling faintly.

“No.” Thanatos said simply.

“Well, you’re in the wrong place, girl, because unless you tell me where my Key is, you’re going to die.”

Thanatos nodded once. “One day, I will die. But not at your hands. One day, there will nothing left alive in this or any other universe. There will no need for Death. And on that day, death shall die.”

“Huh?” Glory said, eloquently.

“But you will not live to see that.” Thanatos continued, as though Glory had remained silent.

“I’m a god, little girl.” Glory said, spreading her hands. “I will outlive this world and everything on it. I will still be alive when this universe dies, and I will dance on its ashes and laugh.”

“No.” Thanatos said simply. “You won’t.”

The smile that had been playing faintly around Glory’s lips dropped away as though it had never been there. “You’re getting on my nerves, kid, and I'm feeling hungry. So don’t take it personally, but I’m going to stick my fingers into your skull and suck out your sanity. That sound good to you?”

Thanatos didn’t move. Her expression didn’t change one whit. Strangely enough, Glory didn’t move either, although her expression most definitely changed. It cycled rapidly from anger to confusion and back to anger again. “What did you do? Why can’t I move?”

“The gods hate me.” Thanatos said conversationally. “They know that sooner or later, I will sever their essence from their bodies, and they will travel the path that all living things must travel. And I hate them, because until such time as that happens they are immortal. Unlike other living things, I cannot snuff them out like a candle. They upset the natural order of things. Everything must die.”

Thanatos walked towards Glory. “And then there’s you. A god bound in the body of a human. You might not die, but the human whose body hosts you? He most certainly can.”

Thanatos smiled then, a beatific smile. “Today is the day that I kill a god.”

Thanatos made no movement, stopping to stand several feet in front of Glory. Her pale, colourless eyes bore into Glory’s and watched as the life fled from them, and they became nothing more than glassy orbs staring at that which only the dead see.

Her lip curled into a smile as she felt Glory’s soul begin the plummet towards Tartarus. Ben, meanwhile, went on his way to judgement, as all human souls must. Thanatos didn’t care what happened to him. It wasn’t her job to fret over the judgement of every soul. She merely took them where they were meant to go.

It wasn’t the first time that she had killed a god. She had killed Helios, and his duties had been handed over to Apollo. Countless minor deities had been ended by her hand, and by and large they were completely forgotten by the humans who had once worshipped them and laid sacrifices in their altars.

Thanatos could not find it in herself to pity them for this. Quite aside from the fact that she rarely, if ever thought of those whose souls she reaped, she considered gods to be an abomination. One day, they would be as completely forgotten as they deserved to be. Perhaps Thanatos would be the only one still alive to see it, but see it she would.

However, that day was far off in the distant future. Thanatos still had business to deal with in the present.


	8. Chapter Eight

Pale Death beats equally at the poor man's gate and at the palaces of kings.  
-Horace

~*~

Death is not infallible. It doesn’t have to be. Sooner or later, everyone and everything would die. For untold aeons, Thanatos had been unable to carry out her duties as efficiently as she once had. During that time, the vampire race had flourished, never aging, immortal save for a violent death. Like the gods, this was an affront to the way that things should be. Such a race should never have come into existence.

Thanatos might not have been able to stop vampires from being created, all those millennia ago. But she could certainly stop them now.

It wouldn’t be the first genocide that Thanatos had caused. She had taken the souls of the warlike Bronze people, when Zeus had drowned them in a flood. She had sent the souls of the impious Silver people down into Fields of Punishment. Now, the vampire race would join them in extinction. The fragments of the demon that animated them would be driven down to the underworld alongside the souls of the vampires which did not return to their bodies.

It didn’t take Thanatos any time at all to do this. Death is everywhere. She was upon the face of the earth, and through her the natural order of the cosmos worked. Sooner or later, entropy would overtake everything. Things which defied this, things which lived in despite everything, they were the true abominations.

Across the world, vampires collapsed, their animating demon flying straight to Tartarus to be damned to eternal suffering. Some few of the vampires regained their souls, like Spike had, but the majority by far simply died, their bodies decomposing as time finally caught up with them. But Thanatos didn’t care what happened to the vampires after they ceased to become vampires. It was none of her concern.

Of course, vampires weren’t the only exception to the proper running of the universe. Trapped in the Deeper Well, neither living nor dead, the Old Ones lay. It was difficult to describe what state these colossal beings were in. It was as though they lay in a deep, dreamless sleep, needing only the right combination of circumstances to awaken fully.

Thanatos took the souls of every living thing down to the underworld. It was of no concern of hers whether Hades later chose to release them again – she knew that, sooner or later, she would take them down again. But these Old Ones had never truly died. They had never fallen under the domain of Theon Cthonius. It was about time that they do so.

This took a little longer. The Old Ones were ancient, and powerful beyond telling. They weren’t gods, but they were close. But Thanatos would, one day, reap the souls of even those deathless beings. The Old Ones, confined in limbo, could not resist her now that she was whole once more. They went wailing into the underworld, weeping for the life they had hoped they would one day live.

Eventually, it was done. But Thanatos was not satisfied. Not yet. There was an exception to every rule, and Thanatos had yet to rectify it. But she would. She had all the time in the universe.

Not that it would require nearly that long.

~*~

Angel had been a vampire for a long time. He had become used to the acute senses that came with it. It made it very, very difficult to sneak up on him.

As such, he was taken completely by surprise when Thanatos appeared suddenly in front of his desk. He reared backwards, chair toppling over. “Dawn! What’s going on? How-“ he began, before suddenly trailing off as he looked at what he had thought was Dawn. Really looked. Although Thanatos retained the same general shape as the girl that she had been for so brief a time, there was no way that they could really be mistaken for each other. “Who are you?” Angel said shrewdly.

Thanatos didn’t answer. She hadn’t come to talk. She had come to see the last vampire, and the only one that had a soul. The exception the rule. Something which needed straightening out. Thanatos hadn’t yet decided what to do about it just yet.

Angel didn’t understand that, however. “What did you do with Dawn?”

Thanatos was not capable of pity, or grief, or sadness, or any emotions of that nature. If she had been, she would never have been able to do her job. She felt rage and hatred towards the gods, something which had built in her gradually throughout the ages, but that was all. But if she had been capable of pity, she would have felt it for Angel. She would have felt it for every living thing. They were so limited. The range of their senses was so tiny that they might as well be deaf and blind and mute. They were entirely unaware of the stars that were dying above their heads. The world had changed around him, and Angel hadn’t even noticed.

“I did nothing to Dawn.” Thanatos said. “Dawn does not exist. In a sense, she never really did.”

She could see Angel struggling with that concept. He didn’t believe her. She didn’t care.

The problem with Angel was that, although he had a soul, he was not the same as the wastrel Liam that he had been while he was alive. Nor was he the same as the monstrous Angelus. He was an entirely new creature. He was wrong, she could feel that in same way that she had felt that Spike was wrong, that vampires were wrong. But then there was the soul, singing a counterpart. Though it was tied to him by the all-too-fragile chains of a gypsy curse, the very fact that he had a soul at all set Angel apart from the other vampires. He was unique. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with him.

“You’re lying.” Angel said. Thanatos knew that a threat was coming. She didn’t care. She had been threatened by mortals before, and only one had ever managed to make good on it. Angel wasn’t nearly clever enough.

Still, she wasn’t about to let a vampire, even one with a soul, remain in existence. The things were rather more difficult to eradicate than cockroaches. It was perfectly possible for Angel to bring back his entire race.

That couldn’t be allowed. So Thanatos acted.

She cut the chains that bound his soul to him, but she didn’t send it to the underworld as she usually would. Instead, she held it in abeyance. Then she acted towards Angelus in the same way as she had with every other vampire. He collapsed.

Thanatos didn’t know whether a human version of Angelus would wake up, or a human Angel, or whether he would simply die. Truthfully, she didn’t care. The problem was fixed, and that was all that was important.

There was nothing more to do here, but there was still something that she had to do.

~*~

Death is not infallible. It can be tricked, it can be trapped. One can run from it. In certain cases, it was possible to snatch someone from the very jaws of death, allowing them to live once again.

Buffy was one such case. She had been killed by the Master, but Xander had resuscitated her.

Death is not infallible. It doesn’t have to be. Sooner or later, everyone and everything would die.

Buffy was in the morgue, waiting for someone to come and talk to her about her mother. Xander and Anya were waiting with her. Evidently, they hadn’t talked to Willow or Tara yet.

Buffy was on her feet in a second when Thanatos appeared, but she didn’t back away like Angel had. She instantly saw that she wasn’t Dawn any longer, but she didn’t speak, or stare. She just walked towards Thanatos and wrapped her in a tight hug.

Thanatos didn’t return the hug, but neither did she stop her, or move away.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you, Dawn, but I hope you're okay.” Buffy murmured, without letting go.

The unobservant nature of mortals never ceased to amaze Thanatos. She wasn’t Dawn. Even Dawn hadn’t been Dawn, not really. She couldn’t understand why Buffy was still clinging to the idea that she had a sister. “I am not Dawn. Dawn was just a fragment, a part of the whole. She doesn’t really exist.”

Buffy let go, took a few steps back. She had thought that this transformation, this new, pale Dawn was part of the fact that she was the Key. It explained why she had been so weird around the morgue earlier, and the things she had said about Joyce’s soul. She hadn’t even contemplated the fact that there might be something else going on.

“If you’re not Dawn, what are you?”

Thanatos spread her wings. They shouldn’t have fit in the narrow corridor, but they did. They gave of an air of something very large in a small place. They simultaneously seemed incredibly distant and very close at the same time. “I am Thanatos.” Thanatos said simply.

Buffy said nothing. This was too much to take, today of all days. She didn’t want to deal with this. She just wanted it to be yesterday, when Joyce was alive and Dawn was normal. She wanted it so badly that she couldn’t breathe.

“You should know that Glory’s dead. So are all the vampires.”

Buffy surprised herself by saying “I don’t care. I don’t care about any of that. I just want my sister back.”

Thanatos looked at her gravely. “I cannot grant life. I cannot return something to you that never truly lived.”

Then she was gone, and Buffy was alone, even with her friends by her side.

~*~

Sometime later, after the formalities of Joyce’s death had been dealt with and Buffy had fended off any talk even remotely related to Dawn or Glory or Thanatos or vampires, Buffy returned home alone. She needed time by herself. Her house was empty, she was the only one living in it, but as long as she wasn’t with her friends she could pretend that Joyce would walk in at any moment, or that Buffy would come downstairs and see Dawn making something ridiculous in the kitchen.

Buffy had fully expected to break down and start crying when she returned home, because she no longer had to be strong. She didn’t expect to see Dawn, the real Dawn, not the pale facsimile that was Thanatos, lying upon the coach, the same one which Joyce had died on.

Buffy felt as though her heart would burst, or stop, or vanish entirely. She wasn’t sure what she felt. Tentatively, as though in one of those dreams where moving is difficult, she made her way over to the couch. She couldn’t help but think that the day’s events were repeating themselves again. She couldn’t bear it if that was true. She would rather die than go through that again.

But, before she made it Dawn’s side, Dawn opened her eyes and took a breath and smiled and said “Buffy? What’s going on?”


	9. Chapter Nine

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?  
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

~*~

What was going on? Besides the fact that Buffy felt as though everything, absolutely everything, the entire contents of the universe, was bearing down on her? Buffy felt as though the world was trying its best to drive her into her grave like a hammer driving a nail into the ground. Her mother was dead, and her sister was Death, and she felt like her heart had frozen and shattered, perforating her other organs. She hurt too much to deal with this, to deal with anything, but she had no choice. Everything was going on.

Buffy sat on the arm of the couch and said “What do you remember?”

Dawn opened her mouth to say that she didn’t remember anything that would make Buffy look the way she did, when suddenly she remembered. Not just Joyce’s death, although that would have been enough to drive her to her knees had she been standing.

She remembered everything. She remembered being alongside every living thing, from amoebas to grass to the mighty creatures that lived in the depths of the oceans. She remembered knowing that she could snuff them out in an instant, and knowing that she didn’t need to. They would all die soon enough, in the grand scheme of things.

To say that this sudden knowledge made Dawn feel as though her head was going to explode was an enormous understatement.

Dawn felt as though the only thing that had previously been in her head had been dust, insignificant and insubstantial, and this knowledge had caused it to coalesce. A star had burst into life in her skull, filling her skull with heat and light. Planets had formed, too, slamming into her skull with every orbit, scraping against the inside of her eyes. Dawn didn’t think, she wasn’t capable of that, but she felt as though she was dead. Living couldn’t possibly feel like this.

Then, after aeons, billions, trillions of years, the sensation faded. It didn’t entirely go away, that sense of power and connection, but Dawn felt as though a partition had gone up in her mind. It was thin, fragile, but it protected her from the ravaging force of those memories.

She could hear again, and see and touch and feel. She was no longer drowning in the ocean of her own consciousness. In a voice which sounded, to her, as insubstantial as a single snowflake, Dawn said “I remember being Death.”

Buffy nodded, as though that was exactly what she had expected. The truth was that this whole situation scared her. Everything since she had come home and seen Joyce had scared her so much that she was surprised she could even think. “So, are you still, um, Thanatos?”

Dawn shook her head slowly. She wasn’t sure, not entirely, but she felt different. Before, when Thanatos had begun to emerge after Joyce’s death, Dawn had felt as though everything was slightly familiar, just something that she couldn’t quite remember. It hadn’t been scary, because it had seemed like a dimly recalled memory from childhood.

She felt like she was in new territory, now. Whatever she was, human, Key, or something else entirely, it was different.

“So, um, don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but, uh, what are you?” Buffy asked bluntly.

That was the question. Dawn didn’t know. She had absolutely no idea. She didn’t feel like Thanatos. Thanatos had been cold and pale and as flawless as thin ice on a winter morning. Now, she felt warm and alive.

Dawn couldn’t quite recall if that was how she had felt before Thanatos had begun to emerge. She remembered quite clearly feeling shocked when she found out that she was the Key because she didn’t feel like that could possibly be the case, but Dawn couldn’t remember if she felt the same now as she felt then.

“I don’t know.” Dawn said. Then she smiled. She was like a bulb which someone had buried and cultivated without knowing what would grow. All she could do was wait until she sprouted, and then she would know. “But we’ll find out sooner or later.”

“What do we do now, though?”

Dawn got up and stretched luxuriously. It felt good to move. “We get on with things. We live. We grow.”

It wasn’t as easy as that, Buffy knew. She had thought she had been doing just that when she had graduated and moved to UC Sunnydale, but it had turned out that things there was just the same as they had been in high school. Even if Thanatos had killed Glory and every single vampire, there would be something else for her to deal with. There always was. “It’s not as easy as that, Dawnie.”

Dawn stood on tiptoes then rocked back on her heels. “Sure it is.”

Buffy didn’t want to speak. She didn’t want to burden Dawn with her own problems. She had to be strong. She couldn’t tell Dawn that, more than dealing with whatever evil thing wanted to destroy the world, the hardest thing in this world was to live in it. She couldn’t bring herself to say that Dawn.

Dawn seemed to understand her anyway. She reached out and grabbed Buffy’s arm, and pulled her towards the door. Standing just behind Buffy so that Buffy had an unobstructed view of the world outside their house, Dawn waved an arm at the sky and asked “What do you see?”

While Buffy stared at the blue, cloudless sky in confusion as she wondered what Dawn could possibly be talking about, Dawn picked up the balled lily petals that she had made that morning a million years ago. She smoothed them out gently one by one, looking at their mangled, shapless forms sadly.

Eventually, Buffy said “The Sun?”

Dawn went to stand behind Buffy again. “Exactly. Isn’t it glorious?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry.” Dawn said softly. “I can teach you.”

Neither of them noticed that the lily petals had changed, growing from broken, dead things to whole, miniature, perfect flowers.


End file.
